


sunshine is a kind of fire

by dieoniceus



Category: Mesopotamian Mythology
Genre: Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-21
Updated: 2016-06-21
Packaged: 2018-07-16 08:57:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,897
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7261093
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dieoniceus/pseuds/dieoniceus





	sunshine is a kind of fire

  
**she is quiet**  
  
Every day she walks through a small forrest of pine trees to the meadow. Early in the morning to watch the sun rise over the trees, after school with her dads rough, scratchy old picnic blanket to wrap around her shoulders and a thermos of tea to see the day end. There is a stream, and a dipping valley, and soft corse ferns all around her. The smell of earth and green. She breathes it every day. She lies on her stomach in the meadow grass, trailing her hands over the flowers - red, yellow, white. Wildflowers under a blue sky, cocooned by mossy trees. She closes her eyes and feels. The world is very quiet and very loud. She feels green, and earth, and bright. She feels love.  
  


there are noises in the forrest, thuds and whispers, but she never feels afraid.  
  
She lives in the village. She takes music lessons. She likes to sing under her breath. She goes to school, and learns, and gets annoyed that she doesn’t already know everything. She spits on a boy in the playground because he won’t leave her alone. She runs away when the teacher tells her to come with him. She runs to the meadow, where the sun moves inside her as a bright, endless warmth and the forest covers her with the scent of moss and fern and flowers. She doesn’t go to detention. The teachers don’t know what to do with her. Her father says she is his magic girl. Her teachers say she is like an animal. She feels like herself - endless, overflowing with feelings she can’t explain, beautiful and terrifying.  
  
One day, as she lies in the meadow soaking in the afternoon sun, she falls into a deep sleep. She sees her house, her garden. She wades through a murky lake to her front door. It opens and out pours an ocean of gold, coins spilling out into the lake, into her outstretched palms. When she wakes, there is a sunflower rapidly growing before her. It grows up and out, so tall and thick she climbs up the leaves and trunk, over the tops of the trees and sits on its giant petals. The sky is pink and grey. She is light, and sad, and scared. She sits above the forrest, the sprawling village, the distant city of smoke, and watches the world from the clouds.  
  
She wanters home in the dark one night, blanket in hand. She’s much later than usual. It’s autumn, and her jacket is too thin for the night chill and most of the stars are covered by clouds. There is only one light left in the sky, she stares up at it and wonders. She starts to feel afraid. It’s crushing and unfamiliar. The forest reaches out over the pavements and whispers to her through the leaves. Wolves pace out of the trees and roll over the ground, sniff at her hands and rub against her legs. She runs her fingers through their fur and holds them tight against her, the warmth of their bodies melts out the cold from under her skin. She follows them into the trees as the forest shifts and changes around them. The forest sings and she sings back, soft murmurs under her breath. Snow is thick beneath her feet. She kicks off her socks and shoes to feel it against her skin.  
  
She runs with the wolves and never feels tired. She snarls and growls and rolls and plays. She falls asleep curled amongst them. She grows fur and her eyes turn yellow and predatory. She runs with the wolves and never feels afraid again. She is with the pack, she’ll never be alone again. The restlessness pacing in her bones pushes up through her throat and she howls, and they howl, and she feels alone and surrounded, comforted and devastated. She feels vicious. She paces the ground each night and brings dead things back to her bed. She plays in the sun and nips and chases with the other wolves. When the decay rises she swallows it back down into her lungs  
  
 then the snow melts and she’s back home, lying in her garden with her violin beside her. It’s night again, and her family sits inside. A fire is lit, and dinner is on the table. She growls under her breath when they greet her. That night she watches the stars through her window and prays for snowfall.  
  
**she is loud  
**

  
She sits inside a pond. She is much older now, too old almost. It claws inside her and shakes her skin. the pond is rippling around her, a small school of fish darts out in front of her. She wants to scope them up in her hands but she can’t seem to catch them before they disappear again. The pond shows her faces of people she has lost. She cries, but she doesn’t quite feel sad. Maybe she feels too sad. She can never tell anymore. She crawls out of the pond, and her tears soften the ground. It grows horned plants that cut her hands when she touches them. She dips her palms back into the pond, and it shimmers gold. 

  
She moves to the city and starts a job at an office. Someone keeps leaving her messages in the frosted glass of her office, even in the summer. People complain about the cold, but nothing ever works to heat the space up. She reads the writing multiple times a day, but she can never quite understand the language. She walks the streets at nights and isn’t afraid. She has the sky, and the ground, and something restless and deadly pacing inside her skin like a roaming animal. Everyone can sense it, they are drawn to her and they run as fast as they can. She watches them come and go with relative disinterest, but she always likes it best when they stay. Sometimes people will kneel before her like they don’t even know what they’re doing. They eye her with fear and a desperate plea for her approval. She brushes their hair and strokes their cheeks, and they tremor under the weight of her power. She smiles. She calls her father on the weekends. He still calls her his magic girl. She smiles and doesn’t correct him, yet. She goes out and meets a boy in the sticky thrum of a music show. They dance under dim lights. She sweats and her hair tangles. He kisses her and she bites his lip. That night, they walk to a scrappy beach nearby and wander along the shoreline. He tells her a story about mermaids and kisses her hair. She takes his hand and reads a pretend map of his life. She tells him he will find peace. He laughs.  
  
  
She goes home to see her father. The woods are smaller now. She drinks coffee with her father in front of the fire. He tells her heaven needs her. She says she wants time. When he smiles at her, his eyes are sad. Inanna wanders out into the woods and searches until she finds paw prints over disturbed earth and follows them. She does not find wolves, but a swallow who lands on her outstretched hand and sings. She does not sing back, but she smiles and follows the swallow when it flies up and away through the trees. The swallow leads her to the edge of a cliff and keeps flying. She closes her eyes and runs over the edge. The wind catches her arms and she drifts, then rises. She follows the swallow over the woods, her house, the streets and the city. They fly higher until she can’t see her guide anymore, just the endless stretch of the world. She flights further and further up. She wants to go far away, but the swallow calls to her and she drifts back down, and follows them back down to the garden near her house. She lands on solid earth and cries out. She feels deeply relieved, and truly devastated.  
  
**she is gold**

She falls in love. She meets him wandering through the woods, he sits under a birds nest and she wants him. It feels desperate and real like nothing else has. He follows her back to her city and she build a life for him, but he sleeps and eats and moves and breathes and eventually it all annoys her. Her love is dangerous, it sets him apart and watches him fall. She wants him near all the time and then gradually not at all. She makes him into a bird and sets him free to fly. She watches him go without remorse or regret. She thinks she will always love him, in a way. In a way, she’s right.  
  
  
She grows insatiable, like the great pacing life within her is ravenous and desperate. She wants so much, the world feels too small, gravity too compressed around her. She wants to move, to break and mend and open and close like the petals of a flower, falling open and in again in reverse, and again and again and again. She wants. She wants. She wants. She breathes, in and out, and it is nothing. There is nothing in this form that holds her. She is limitless. She needs to move. She needs more. She needs to howl, and scream, and feel and spill all of herself out into the world and the sky and earth and everything in it. She sees people pass her and she loves them. So much. Too much. She wants to cradle them gently in her hands and crush them. She wants everything.  
  
She feels like a burning torch. She blazes, leaves a trail. Ash and broken, burnt lovers. She loves compulsively and devours all they have to offer her. She only looks ahead, to the road and to the sky. She buys broken jewellery and old dresses. She likes the touches they have felt, the memories they gather around them like black satin sheets. Every day she feels more powerful and less real. She is weightless and unafraid.  
  
  
one day she reads the writing on her office window and she understands it. she wipes the frost clear, puts on her coat, and walks out of the building. everyone watches but no one asks her where she is going. she walks for hours, or days, or months, out of the city and to the ocean. She finds a stranger on the docks and asks him for his boat. He gives it to her without hesitation. She sails out, into the sea. The boat navigates by itself, she sits on the deck and eats slices of watermelon and drinks the juice as it rolls down her fingers. A sunflower grows from the wood of the deck. She smiles at it every morning, and waters it every day. She wears her favourite dress to swim in the ocean every day, until the colours run out and it turns grey, and then white. Her hair is brittle with sea water and she is beautiful. She adorns herself with broken jewellery and sings, loud over the waves. One morning, she approaches the edge of the earth. The sun rises huge and fierce before her, and around her she watches the sea turn to gold.


End file.
